The ups and downs of the currency circle: from a pile of air to $89,000
The world of Web3 is partying every day.
Late last night, people were sighing at the depression of "Double Eleven" while exclaiming at the soaring price of Bitcoin. As of last night, Bitcoin rose above 89,000 USDT, a level never seen before in history.
This is the seventh year since Web3 emerged on a large scale in China.
People like to use the term "seven-year itch" to describe changes in a relationship. As for the Web3 world, the past seven years have been the seven years in which it has almost gone from a niche to a relatively popular one in China, and has been widely discussed and debated.
Most people have gone from knowing nothing about Web3 to knowing a little, or even being part of it; industry insiders are gradually moving from the margins to the mainstream. This once bleak industry, like others, is not only characterized by the initially captivating wealth effect but also presents more layered cycles and intricate entanglements of human nature.
Today, there are over 500 million crypto users globally, with on-chain stablecoin assets exceeding $173 billion. Yet many still do not understand what has happened in the Web3 world and what is currently happening.
Seven years ago, 24-year-old JW graduated from Tsinghua University's Schwarzman College and by chance joined Web3. This was her first job. At that time, most of her classmates entered investment banks, consulting, government departments, and academic research.
As she said, fate arranged for her to see an unimaginable surreal world: there are idealists obsessed with decentralization, and there are scammers just here to make a quick buck; some have received excess returns, but there are also those who have lost everything. And she herself went from being someone who knew nothing about the cryptocurrency world to becoming the founder of a fund.
Wherever there are people, there will be a community. It's just that in the Web3 space, which is closer to money, the community is more ruthless.
In this article, JW will reflect on the past seven years of the cryptocurrency world from a first-person perspective. "Reflecting on where we are today and why we still walk in this field."
One day in the coin world is a year in the human world.
People generally believe that the concept of Bitcoin was born on November 11, 2008, proposed by the now-missing Satoshi Nakamoto.
In China, on June 9, 2011, Yang Linke and Huang Xiaoyu founded Bitcoin China, the country's first Bitcoin trading platform; in 2013, OKCoin and Huobi were successively established.
But this is a game that only a few people participate in—so few that you can count them on two hands.
It wasn't until 2017 that Bitcoin became a 'household name.' That year, Bitcoin's price skyrocketed from less than 1,000 USD at the beginning of the year to 19,000 USD by the end. A 20-fold increase, along with the wealth creation myth of batch ICOs, instantly shocked the entire internet and VC circles.
Whether or not you participate, everyone is talking about blockchain; the air is filled with white papers.
Li Xiaolai, Xue Manzi, Chen Weixing, and other big V's vigorously preach the ideals of decentralization while encouraging fans to invest in their projects. In early January 2018, the famous investor Xu Xiaoping's WeChat screenshot stating 'The blockchain revolution has arrived' is still vividly remembered.
At 3 a.m. on February 11, 2018, Yuhong and a group of sleepless friends founded a WeChat group called '3 o'clock sleepless blockchain.' Within three days, this group 'exploded'… The combined net worth of the group members is probably in the trillions.
A saying popular in the crypto circle is:
If you haven't heard of the 3 o'clock blockchain group, it means you're not part of the blockchain community.
If you haven't joined the 3 o'clock blockchain group, it means you're not a big shot in the blockchain circle.
If you haven't been spammed by the 3 o'clock blockchain group, it means you still don't understand what 'one day in the coin world is a year in the human world' means.
But this is just the prelude to madness.
"This is the e-commerce godfather of Korea."
In the summer of 2018, I traveled to Seoul with my former boss (one of the top fund founders in Asia) to attend Korea Blockchain Week.
South Korea is one of the most important markets in the cryptocurrency industry, with the Korean won being the second most traded fiat currency—second only to the US dollar. Cryptocurrency entrepreneurs and investors from all over the world want to get a piece of the pie here.
We are here to meet a company called Terra, which is a top project in Korea. The meeting is scheduled at a Chinese restaurant in the Shilla Hotel, a traditional hotel in Korea that can be said to be somewhat conservative.
As a reception hall for the local government, the lobby was filled with enthusiastic young people from all over the world, passionate about the crypto world.
Terra was founded by two Korean founders, Dan Shin and Do Kwon. Dan's company Tmon was once one of the largest e-commerce platforms in Korea, with over $3.5 billion in annual GMV; while Do, who is about the same age as me, also tried several startups after graduating from Stanford.
Similar to investment thoughts in traditional fields, considering 'people' is also the key to Web3 investments. People like Dan, who have succeeded in the Web2 world, instantly attract the participation of all top cryptocurrency exchanges and funds.
Later, we invested $2 million in Terra.
Perhaps Do and I are of the same age, and we have kept in touch since then. Do and I are similar to other classmates in the computer science major: a guy with a standard American accent, wearing a t-shirt and shorts.
Do told me that they planned to turn the stablecoins issued by Terra into a widely adopted digital currency, such as how they negotiated with Korea's largest convenience store chain, the Mongolian government, and retail groups in Southeast Asia.
They also developed a payment application called Chai, 'which will become the Alipay of the world.'
In an office that looked eerily like a warehouse, when Do talked to me about their grand plans while sipping coffee, I felt like I was in a dream: at that time, I actually didn't understand how they would realize these plans. I just felt that it sounded so novel and ambitious.
At this time, cryptocurrencies had not yet become a consensus (of course, they still haven't to this day). Most of my classmates, who are either at investment banks, consulting firms, or major tech companies, are either completely unaware of cryptocurrencies or filled with doubts, while I am here chatting with someone who plans to launch a 'global payment network.'
This is an era of chasing narratives, large funds, and professor coins.
"Help me track this link and tell me how much money has been deposited, and the deadline is this week." My boss sent me a link; it was a Dutch auction project, a Layer 2 project running a public sale.
In fact, we had never actually met this team; they merely provided a website and a white paper for their project, yet raised over $26 million in 2018. Although this token has since plummeted to 0.
People would rather trust a stranger online, crossing continents, than trust someone in the same room.
At that time, I had just turned 24, and although I guessed that most members of the investment committee, at times, also didn't really know what they were doing—just like me.
But they encouraged me to invest another $500,000 in this project, 'just to make a friend.'
They tried to replicate the madness of 2017: as long as there is support from famous funds, any random code name can skyrocket by 100 times.
But the music soon came to a halt.
"When will Bitcoin return to $10,000?"
I once thought this was the most wonderful job in the world: traveling around the globe at a young age; purchasing expensive business class tickets and hotels; mingling in opulent venues; learning new things and making diverse friends.
But the bear market came unexpectedly.
In December 2018, Bitcoin's price plummeted from a high of over $14,000 to $3,400. As a young person just starting my career, I didn't have much savings, but when I saw Ethereum's price drop from $800 to $400 and then to $200, I decided to bet one month's salary.
In hindsight, this was not a wise decision. Less than a month after I bought in for $200, ETH's price dropped below $100.
In the first half of 2020, the world was hit hard by the pandemic, and the cryptocurrency industry also suffered a severe blow in the market crash on March 12. At that time, I was stuck in Singapore.
I still remember that afternoon; every time I opened a price-checking website, Bitcoin's price dropped another $1,000. A month ago, Bitcoin's price was around $10,000, but within just a few hours, it plummeted from $6,000 to $3,000—much lower than when I first entered the industry.
For me, this felt more like a farce. I was observing everyone’s reactions: some were waiting; some were bottom-fishing; some were getting liquidated.
Even more experienced investors feel pessimistic.
There are even discussions about whether the cryptocurrency industry will continue to exist; some believe it may just be a detour in the history of technology.
However, some chose to stay. At that time, my institution had no new investments, but I was still receiving projects.
Soon, decentralized finance (DeFi) began to become a topic of conversation. I am not a trader myself, but all my trader colleagues believed that DeFi was not a good idea: everything was slow, order-book-based exchanges were impossible, there was no liquidity, and fewer users.
What I didn't fully understand at the time was that security and permissionlessness are the biggest selling points of DeFi, but does permissionlessness really appeal to people? After all, the KYC (Know Your Customer) of centralized exchanges isn't too bad.
Attending DevCon IV and DevCon V during the bear market was also an eye-opening experience.
Although I studied computer science in college and am not unfamiliar with hackathons, I had never seen so many 'eccentric' developers in one place before. Even when ETH's price dropped by 90%, people still passionately discussed decentralization, privacy, and on-chain governance on Ethereum.
I have no faith in decentralization, nor do I have passion for anarchism—these concepts have only appeared in my classes.
But developers seem to have truly embraced these philosophies.
"Your timing for joining wasn't great," a colleague consoled me. The previous year at DevCon III in Cancun, Mexico, our fund made tens of millions by investing in those projects showcased at the event.
During the bear market, we also missed the investment opportunity in Solana when its valuation was below $100 million (now its market value has exceeded $84 billion).
Even though we interviewed the founder Anatoly and Kyle from Multicoin. Kyle has great trust in this project, believing it will become the 'killer' of Ethereum.
Solana's TPS is 1,000 times higher than Ethereum's, thanks to their use of a consensus mechanism called 'Proof-of-History.'
However, after my colleague and Anatoly completed a technical due diligence call, they believed, 'Solana is too centralized. Centralized TPS is meaningless; why not just use AWS?' Clearly, my colleague was not fond of it, 'and the founder doesn’t understand the value of a truly decentralized network like Ethereum, perhaps because he previously worked at Qualcomm.'
DeFi TVL growth chart—the chart that every venture capitalist would go crazy for, DeFi Llama.
With the introduction of yield farming concepts, my doubts about decentralized finance (DeFi) were quickly dispelled.
By depositing tokens into DeFi smart contracts, users can become liquidity providers for the platform and earn protocol fees and governance token rewards.
Whether you call it a growth flywheel or a death spiral, DeFi protocols have achieved tremendous growth in user numbers and total locked value (TVL).
Specifically, the TVL of DeFi protocols surged from less than $10 million at the beginning of 2020 to over $100 billion by mid-2021.
Thanks to open-source technology, replicating or modifying a DeFi protocol takes just a few hours. Because the process of providing liquidity is called 'yield farming,' DeFi protocols are often named after food.
For a period, new 'food coins' were born almost daily—from Sushi to Yam.
People in the cryptocurrency circle love this kind of pun; even a protocol with millions of transactions can be named after food and use emojis as a logo.
But the hacking attacks and vulnerabilities in DeFi projects made me nervous. I am not an adventurer.
My friends, however, were frantically yield farming: they would set alarms at 3 a.m. just to be among the first to enter new liquidity pools.
In the summer of 2020, annualized percentage yields (APY) were the hottest topic—everyone was chasing those with the highest APY.
Noticing the market's demand for funding to engage in yield farming, industry veteran Andre Cronje launched a yield aggregator product: Yearn. This product generated huge resonance.
With more and more funds pouring into DeFi, we also witnessed the emergence of some 'big shots' on Twitter: such as SBF from FTX, Do Kwon from Terra, and Su and Kyle from 3AC.
Terra launched several DeFi products, including a payment app Alice aimed at the US market and the lending protocol Anchor.
Anchor may be designed for on-chain novices like me—just deposit your stablecoin into the contract to earn almost 20% annualized return, without even having to think.
At its peak, Anchor's total locked value (TVL) exceeded $17 billion. 'Congratulations to Anchor; this is a great product, and I invested some money in it,' I sent to Do on WeChat, unsure if he would reply.
But I knew that he seemed no longer to be the young man I once knew—he had amassed 1 million followers on Twitter and announced plans to purchase $10 billion worth of Bitcoin.
"Thank you—you're also doing well on the portfolio," he surprisingly replied.
He was referring to some gaming projects I had invested in earlier. DeFi has also changed the gaming landscape in cryptocurrency—now everything is related to 'earning.'
With the madness continuing, I also invested in a lending project by Three Arrows Capital.
A few months later, doubts about Anchor's profitability began to emerge.
It turned out that the lending products provided by Terra did not generate enough revenue to cover the interest paid to liquidity providers like me; current payments are largely subsidized by the Terra Foundation.
Upon seeing this news, I immediately withdrew my funds; around the same time, I also redeemed my investment from Three Arrows Capital.
The atmosphere surrounding cryptocurrencies on Twitter began to feel eerie. Especially when Do tweeted 'Wish you all to be happily poor' and Su was shopping luxuriously in Singapore, it felt like a signal of a market top.
I was fortunate enough to dodge the collapses of Terra and Three Arrows Capital; only months after the crash did I learn that the payment application wasn't actually processing payments on the blockchain, and the borrowed funds were leveraged so high that once the market direction changed, they could never repay.
But when FTX collapsed, I wasn't so lucky.
For weeks, there have been rumors that FTX suffered massive losses in the collapses of Three Arrows Capital and Terra, and may already be insolvent.
Every day, billions of dollars are withdrawn from exchanges. Out of caution, my company also withdrew part, but not all, of its assets from FTX.
It was a turbulent time. Panic rumors about stablecoins USDT and USDC depegging arose almost every day, along with rumors of Binance potentially going bankrupt.
But we did not lose hope; I had trust in SBF—what bad could a billionaire who believes in effective altruism and sleeps in trading halls do?
However, one day on my way to the gym, my partner called to tell me: FTX declared bankruptcy, and $8 billion is missing. Because they misused users' assets, we might not get our money back.
But I was quite calm about this outcome. Perhaps this is our industry: magic internet money. All assets are ultimately just a string of characters and numbers on a screen.
Money is a test of character, and cryptocurrency only speeds everything up. Even fast-forwarding to today, I still have no doubt that Do and SBF's initial motives were well-intentioned.
Perhaps they were overwhelmed by the inflation brought about by unrealistic growth; or they thought they could 'fake it until they make it.'
DeFi is like a Promethean fire in the cryptocurrency industry: it brings hope, but at a great cost.
The misread cryptocurrency world.
As an old Chinese saying goes: 'Illness comes like a mountain collapsing, illness leaves like pulling silk.' The cryptocurrency industry took years to recover from its collapse.
People associate cryptocurrency founders with luxurious attire, love for internet memes, hosting parties worldwide, and doing everything possible to get rich quickly.
At an alumni gathering, I caught up with an old classmate. When I mentioned that I invested in cryptocurrencies, they jokingly said, 'So you're a crypto bro now.' I didn't take this as an offense, but it was indeed a strange statement—it seemed to separate cryptocurrency from technology and VC.
Traditional internet and tech investments are seen as the right path by many, while a relatively well-educated young person joining the crypto industry seems somewhat misguided.
For a long time, the terms 'Web 3' and 'Web 2' have been frequently used in opposing contexts.
But such divisions do not seem to appear in other industries. No one tries to deliberately distinguish founders in the AI field from those in other areas like SaaS.
What is unique about Web3 in the context of venture capital?
My personal view is that cryptocurrencies fundamentally changed the way venture capital and early investments operate, making the success requirements of cryptocurrency startups slightly different from equity-based startups.
In brief, the token economic design in cryptocurrencies has created unparalleled opportunities for startups and venture capitalists.
Ultimately, it all comes down to product-market fit (PMF), user growth, and value creation—this is no different from the Web2 world.
Moreover, with the maturation of the cryptocurrency industry, the integration between Web 2 and Web 3 companies is also increasing.
It’s time to re-examine this industry.
In the early days of cryptocurrency (after all, we are still in the early stages), people wanted something grand (like a digital currency independent of central banks), a new computational paradigm (a universal smart contract platform), a wishful story (like a decentralized storage network to replace AWS), or even a Ponzi scheme that everyone wanted to get in on.
Today, cryptocurrency users are clearer about what they want, and they support these demands by paying for them or shifting capital.
For those outside the industry, it may be difficult to intuitively understand that 'magical internet money' can actually generate income; some crypto assets even offer more attractive P/E ratios than stocks. I tried to illustrate with data—
2.216 billion USD — Ethereum's protocol revenue over the past year;
1.3 billion USD, 97.5 billion USD — the net operating profit of the stablecoin issuing company Tether in Q2 2024, and the total amount of US Treasury bonds held by Tether;
78.99 million USD — meme issuing platform Pump's revenue from March 2024 to now (August 1). Even within the crypto industry, there is much debate about the value of memes: some believe they are a new cultural trend and a tradable consensus, like Elon Musk wanting to use Dogecoin on his Mars colony; others see them as a cancer in the industry, after all, memes themselves do not provide products or bring value to users.
But I believe that, just from the number of participants and the scale of funds, memes have already become a social experiment that cannot be ignored—tens of millions of users worldwide and hundreds of billions of dollars in real money, perhaps lacking an obvious tangible meaning, but under the same reasoning, isn't postmodern art also the same?
Many people's first impression of the crypto market might still be: storytelling, hype, and trading.
During the ICO bull market in 2017, this was indeed partly true, but after several cycles, the gameplay in the crypto industry has significantly changed.
Five years have passed, and the revenue-generating capabilities of DeFi protocols have proven PMF. Based on trading comparables, the value of these projects is increasingly close to that of traditional stock markets.
Besides the difference in asset liquidity, the connection to the real world is also generally seen as a major difference between Web2 and Web3.
After all, compared to AI, social, SaaS, and other internet products, Web3 products still seem somewhat distant from the real world.
In some countries, like Southeast Asia, the largest comprehensive application platform Grab (ride-hailing, food delivery, financial products) has already supported cryptocurrency payments; in Indonesia, the fourth largest country by population, users trading crypto assets have exceeded those trading stocks; in Argentina and Turkey, where local currencies have depreciated severely, cryptocurrencies have become a new choice for people to save assets, with Argentina's crypto trading volume exceeding $85.4 billion in 2023.
Although we have not yet fully realized a 'network of ownership,' we have already seen the vibrant innovations that cryptocurrencies have brought to the current internet.
For instance, stablecoins represented by Tether (USDT) and Circle (UDSC) are quietly changing the landscape of global payment networks.
According to a research report from Coinbase, stablecoins have become the fastest-growing payment method. Stripe recently completed the acquisition of the stablecoin infrastructure project Bridge for as much as $1.1 billion, marking the largest acquisition in the crypto world.
Blackbird was founded by a co-founder of Resy, focusing on changing the dining experience by allowing customers to pay for meals with cryptocurrency, especially using its own token $FLY.
This platform aims to connect restaurants and consumers through a cryptocurrency-driven application, while also serving as a loyalty program.
Worldcoin, co-founded by Sam Altman, is an avant-garde movement promoting universal basic income, relying on zero-knowledge proof technology.
Users scan their irises using a device called Orb, which generates a unique identifier called 'IrisHash' to ensure that each participant is a unique human, thus combating the rise of false identities and bot accounts in the digital space. Worldcoin has over 10 million participants globally.
If we could turn back time to that summer of 2017, we might not have imagined what the next seven years would mean for the crypto industry—never thinking so many applications would grow on the blockchain, or that hundreds of billions of assets would be stored in smart contracts.
How AI reflects on cryptocurrencies.
Next, I want to talk about the similarities and differences between cryptocurrencies and AI. After all, many people often compare the two.
Comparing cryptocurrencies with AI might be like comparing apples to oranges.
But viewing today's AI investments from the perspective of cryptocurrency investors might reveal some similarities: both are full-stack technologies, each with their own infrastructure layer and application layer.
But the confusion is similar: it is still unclear which layer will accumulate the most value, the infrastructure layer or the application layer?
"What if Toutiao does what you want to do?" — this could be the nightmare of all entrepreneurs.
The past development history of the internet proves that this nightmare is not an overreaction, from Facebook and Zynga breaking up to make their own mobile games; to later Twitter live streaming and Meerkat, the resource advantages of large firms make it hard for startups to compete.
In the crypto industry, because the economic models of the protocol layer and application layer differ, the focus of each project is not on doing every layer within the ecosystem.
Taking public chains (ETH, Sol, etc.) as an example, the economic model dictates that the more people use this network, the higher the gas income and the greater the token's value. Thus, the leading projects in the crypto world invest most of their energy in ecological construction and attracting developers.
Only the emergence of blockbuster applications will increase the use of underlying public chains, thereby increasing the project's market value. Early-stage infrastructure projects even provide grants ranging from tens of thousands to millions of dollars to eligible application developers.
Our observation is that the value capture of infrastructure and application layers is difficult to distinguish, but for capital, there will be alternating hot spots between infrastructure and application layers, and both are winner-takes-all.
For example, a large influx of capital into public chains leads to enhanced performance of leading projects, creating new application models and phasing out mid and low-end public chains; capital pouring into new business models increases user scale, with leading applications occupying capital and users, prompting higher demands for underlying infrastructure and forcing infrastructure upgrades.
So, what insights can be drawn for investment? The simple truth is that investing in both infrastructure and application layers isn't wrong; the core is still finding that leading player.
Let's turn the clock back to 2024; what kind of public chains ultimately survived?
Disruptive technology does not account for a large proportion of the factors behind project success. Previously, the VC hype for projects that emphasized professors and academic concepts (like Thunder Core, Oasis Labs, Algorand, etc.) ultimately only saw Avalanche come to fruition, and that was under the premise of the professor leaving and full compatibility with Ethereum's ecosystem.
Conversely, Polygon, which was not favored by investors back then due to its lack of innovation (forking ETH), has now leaped into the top five ecosystems in terms of on-chain assets and users.
Regrettably, projects like Near Protocol, which focuses on sharding technology and can outperform Ethereum in TPS, with founders being one of the original authors of the Transformer model paper, raised nearly $400 million, but now the on-chain assets are only around $60 million.
Of course, numbers will fluctuate with market conditions every day, but the trend is indeed very obvious.
The stickiness of developers and users comes from the ecosystem. For public chains, users include not only end-users but also developers (here ignoring miners, which represent a completely different model).
For end users, the more diverse the applications in an ecosystem and the more trading opportunities available, the stickier it will be.
For developers, the ecosystem with more users and better infrastructure—such as comprehensive wallets, blockchain explorers, and decentralized exchanges—will be prioritized for development. This presents a development-driven flywheel effect between developers and users.
The head effect is larger than imagined. The number of users on Ethereum and the capital stock of on-chain applications are greater than all 'Ethereum killers' combined.
When everyone (especially those outside the industry) thinks of smart contract chains, they first think of Ethereum (just as today everyone thinks of AGI when they think of Open AI)—it has almost become the industry standard for anyone wanting to develop blockchain applications.
Additionally, existing leading public chains already hold a significant amount of cash, which can provide investments or donations to developers that new startups cannot reach.
Finally, because most blockchain projects are open-source, the mature top ecosystems allow for more possibilities for decentralized applications' building blocks.
So, what are the significant differences between the development of public chains and large models?
Requirements for infrastructure. According to a16z's statistics, most AI startups spend 80-90% of the money raised in early funding rounds on cloud services.
AI application companies spend an average of 20-40% of their revenue on fine-tuning costs per customer.
Although public chains also offer mining rewards, the costs of hardware/cloud are borne by decentralized miners, and the scale of data currently processed by blockchains is trivial compared to the tens of billions of data labels that AI often handles. Therefore, the infrastructure costs are still much smaller than those of large models.
Liquidity, liquidity, liquidity. Public chains without a mainnet can issue tokens, but AI companies without users and revenue find it hard to go public.
So although various 'professor chains' may ultimately not perform as expected (after all, Ethereum is still the undisputed No.1), it is unlikely from an investor's perspective that they would lose money or completely go to zero.
Large model companies are different; if they can't raise the next round and lack a buyer, they can easily go under. From this perspective, venture capital should be more cautious.
Actual improvements in productivity. Through ChatGPT, LLMs found their PMF and began to be used on a large scale by both B-end and C-end, improving productivity.
Although public chains have experienced two rounds of bull and bear markets, they still lack a killer app, and application scenarios are still in the exploratory stage.
Perception of end users. Public chains and end users are strongly associated; using certain decentralized applications requires knowing which public chain they are on, and then tirelessly moving assets to that public chain, thereby creating a degree of stickiness.
AI, on the other hand, is even more silent, like the processors in cloud services and computers; no one cares whether the ride-hailing app is backed by AWS or Alibaba Cloud. Because ChatGPT's memory is very short-lived, no one cares whether they are chatting with it on its homepage or on an aggregator. So, retaining C-end users is more difficult.
As for the application scenarios of crypto in AI, many teams have provided their own insights, and there is a general consensus that decentralized financial networks will become the default financial transaction network for AI agents. I believe the following diagram accurately summarizes the current stage.
Finding needles in a haystack more agilely.
When I joined the cryptocurrency industry, I had almost no confidence in the idea of decentralization. I think most industry participants felt the same way in the early stages.
People joined this industry for various reasons—for money, technology, curiosity, or just by chance.
But if you ask me today whether I have confidence in cryptocurrencies, I would give a definitive answer. You cannot deny the entire industry because there are scams in the cryptocurrency world, just as you cannot deny the entire financial industry because of Madoff's scandal.
A recent example from my surroundings is: my friend R (pseudonym).
He successfully transformed an idea into a company with 200 employees, positive cash flow, and a market value exceeding $200 million.
R's entrepreneurship revolves around his understanding of decentralized values.
"My girlfriend is a small internet celebrity on TikTok, but influencers can only get a small part of the audience's tips," he once told me, saying that the largest creator network in the world is not fair, "I want to create a decentralized version." At the time, I thought he was joking, but nearly three years later, he actually launched this project. The platform now has hundreds of thousands of users.
For a 24-year-old who joined this industry right after graduation, the past seven years have shown me enough facets of the world: there are idealists, there are opportunistic scammers; there are those who have gained excess returns and those who have lost everything.
I still remember what my former boss, an OG who made a lot of money in the crypto industry, once said: 'You still have to work hard; otherwise, you will just become a wealthy ordinary person.'
I think there is a respected investor who once described the work of VCs as 'finding needles in a haystack.' For me, VC investment in the crypto world is also such a process.
The only difference might be that the haystack of cryptocurrencies moves faster. So we must always remain agile.
The author of this article is JW (@bestmosquito), the founder of Impa Ventures, a fund focused on early-stage investments in the Web3 industry.
The other two partners at Impa Ventures, Shiran and James, along with analyst Guo Yunxiao, also contributed to this article.
This article is a collaborative reprint from: Deep Tide.
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